LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) — A Southern Baptist theologian is criticizing the selection of a British biologist who pioneered the technology of in vitro fertilization as winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in medicine.
Cambridge University professor Robert Edwards is winner of the 2010 prize. Since the birth of the first "test-tube baby" in 1978, more than four million children have been born to infertile couples using the technology in which egg cells are fertilized outside the body and then implanted in the womb.
Numbers aside, Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said the discovery also brought a "great moral transformation" that he believes is being lost in the praise being heaped on the Nobel committee's selection.
The Vatican criticized Edwards' selection, saying that IVF technology has led to the destruction of large numbers of human embryos that are created in a laboratory but never implanted in a womb. Mohler, who has written in the past about the morality of what to do with leftover embryos, said in a podcast Oct. 6 it is impossible to ignore the "social cost" of Edwards' medical breakthrough.
"These are embryonic human beings who will never see life, who have been frozen for a number of years, perhaps even decades, and in the case of some countries they've merely been allowed to thaw and thus destroyed," Mohler said.
Mohler, however, cited "a myriad of other moral complications" as well.
"The idea that a human infant could be conceived outside the normal process of biological reproduction and instead conceived in a laboratory led to a breakdown, a severing of human reproduction from the context of natural sexual relations between a husband and a wife," he said.
"The reality is that in vitro fertilization not only allowed infertile married couples to have babies, but increasingly separated the idea of reproduction from the context of marriage at all," Mohler said.
In the past couple of decades, Mohler said, single women, lesbian couples and gay male couples using a surrogate mother have all used the technology to produce children.
"The separation of the sex act from the procreation of children is no minor moral transformation," Mohler said.
Widespread acceptance of IVF technology also opens the door to public support for other ethically problematic medical discoveries, such as human cloning, he added.
"Once the door to such a technology is opened, it is very difficult to close it," Mohler said.
Edwards invented IVF with Patrick Steptoe (who died in 1988) as a treatment for infertility. According to the Nobel committee, more than 10 percent of all couples worldwide are infertile.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.